Creating a Parish Comfort Zone

White- haired and bespectacled, the priest looked befuddled. Oh dear, he muttered, where is that little turkey?

That is Father Frank Cloherty’s fond shorthand for the 200 or so children at St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church, “because it’s easier than remembering all those names.” The term seems fitting in this bustling parish southeast of Boston--a mix of immigrants and old-time residents in a tough industrial city. Like babes in the barnyard, the kids flock to their pastor.

These young parishioners and their parents are well aware that a terrible cloud has settled over many who wear the Roman collar. They have heard the term “pedophile priest” at home, in Sunday school and in the very sanctuary where Cloherty delivered an angry homily on the topic when the sexual abuse scandal first exploded in January. These 784 families--nearly 3,000 people--are as outraged as anyone about sexual misconduct in the priesthood, and about a church hierarchy that for decades covered it up.

Yet parish offerings are up since January. Attendance has not wavered. Social gatherings continue, bringing together families from diverse origins. No one flees or slams the door when the priest drops by the house unannounced, sometimes in jogging clothes.

Youth groups flourish with such abandon that at one recent outing, a dozen or more teenagers playfully pelted Cloherty with water balloons.

“People here really care about this parish,” said Ellen Vellios, a member at St. Patrick for half her 64 years. “I think we are all trying to work together to understand this thing.”

Though more than 100 priests from the Boston archdiocese have been named in the scandal, St. Patrick appears to have escaped direct experience with a pedophile priest. Still, the issue is close to home, because for several months Cloherty has been doing double duty: commuting to a nearby church whose priest was removed after a 38-year-old allegation against him surfaced.

Cloherty--known here as often as not as Father Frank, or sometimes just Frank--also has insisted that the topic be on the table at St. Patrick. He convened “listening sessions” days after the scandal broke. And right from the beginning, said pastoral associate Jeanne LaFond, “he expressed his feelings about what was going on.”

The 66-year-old priest was so upset, she remembered, that “actually he started to break down a bit, so some people in the congregation went up to him and gave him a hug.”

More than simple respect, that strong level of comfort between pastor and parishioners characterizes St. Patrick in particular--and on a broader level, many churches made up of new immigrants and a wide range of incomes. In such parishes, the crisis among members of the Catholic hierarchy may only have driven worshipers closer to their pastors.

They are relieved to be worshiping in a setting that has not been directly hit by the crisis. They continue to draw strength from their faith and from each other. They spare no wrath for leaders such as Cardinal Bernard Law, archbishop of Boston. But their faith transcends the hierarchy.

“What I have seen is that the more evident it has become that the bishops have really failed the church, the more people have warmed to their local clergy,” said Paul F. Lakeland, a professor of religious studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut. “There’s a closeness between people and pastor that might not have been there before the bishops started to fail them.”

In a setting like St. Patrick, parishioners agree that Cloherty was courageous for standing up so early and airing his own indignation, almost in defiance of his superiors.

“But what are they going to do?” asked Lakeland, who studies Catholicism in America. “Move him to a poorer parish?”

Diplomatically, Cloherty describes his parishioners as “not wealthy.” Many fall under the rubric of the working poor. But there are also professionals--lawyers and architects--for example. A year ago, the average weekly offering at St. Patrick was $3,000. Since January, that figure has grown to $3,600.

About 50% of congregants here are Hispanic, representing 17 Spanish-speaking countries. There are also new immigrants from Haiti and Cape Verde (off the west coast of Africa), and about 5% of worshipers are from Southeast Asia.

It would be tempting in this setting to talk about building bridges. But really, said lifelong parishioner Nick Allard, 17, “There’s a lot of different people, and we do a lot to accommodate each other.”

The small choir shuns robes and sings to the accompaniment of maracas, a tambourine and conga drums. Though there are seven Catholic churches in this city of 94,000, Cloherty jokes with unfortunate honesty that many choose this brick edifice two doors from a Salvation Army rehab center just to hear his miserable Spanish.

In a homily, he also quipped that over the years, some parishioners have accused him of “becoming Protestant” because of his sweeping interpretation of the Scriptures. On this same Sunday, before baptizing a baby named Miguel Angel, Cloherty invited 7-year-old Nathan Lom to help act out a liturgical lesson that involved bopping the priest with tree branches.

A Diverse Congregation

Julie Lom, Nathan’s mother, credits the diverse congregation for promoting such a relaxed relationship with the pastor. As is the case in her husband’s home community in central Mexico, Lom said, “We see him as a person and not as a priest. He is more or less like an equivalent, not up on some pedestal.”

Soon after the scandal broke, Lom questioned her four sons intensely. After that, she said, she felt comfortable sending them on outings or to the movies with Father Frank.

“My older son Moises--he is 13--works at the rectory on Sundays by himself. He is there with all the priests, but I feel completely safe,” said Lom, a registered nurse. “I know that may sound naive to some people, but I do. I feel very safe at this parish.”

In turn, Cloherty has refused to change some aspects of his job.

“I know there are some priests who now say they will never be alone with an altar boy in the sacristy,” he said. “Give me a break. Why should I engage in radically different behavior? I don’t see it.”

Yet Cloherty admitted he does think twice now before hugging a child. He seldom initiates physical contact with the “little turkeys” in his parish--and when he does, he makes sure another adult is present.

“It certainly has made me more guarded,” he said. “But I can fool around with them in other ways. I can make jabbing remarks, for instance. The issue is that they need attention. They don’t need to be hugged all the time.”

For Cloherty, the bigger issue is clericalism--as he put it--”protecting the image of the church, and doing so at the expense of putting people at risk.”

The son of Irish immigrants who spoke Gaelic at home, Cloherty was trained more than 40 years ago as a diocesan priest. A seminary classmate was John J. Geoghan, the former priest whose conviction in January unleashed the crisis. In 1984, Cloherty filed a sexual abuse complaint on behalf of a boy against Geoghan with the Boston archdiocese. Nothing happened, he said.

He offers no defense for sexual misconduct by priests, and strongly faults the church.

“It did not in any way prepare us for a life of celibacy,” he said. “The church has to take responsibility for that.”

Ten years into his tenure at St. Patrick, Cloherty has pressed his congregants to seize the crisis as an opportunity. “I believe firmly that the leadership in resolving this has to come from the lay people,” he said. “We have an emancipated lay people. They don’t need someone in quotation marks to be their ‘Father,’ telling them what to do.”

Rallying Cry

At parties where chorizo is served alongside Asian rice, this kind of openness has made the crisis almost a rallying cry. Tammy Fernandez, 18, says that at her mother’s weekly Bible study group, “This has been an ongoing conversation. It has to be, because this is something we have to deal with.”

Fernandez, bound for college in the fall, welcomes what she sees as a healthy willingness to address a fundamentally distasteful topic. “Where my parents come from”--the Dominican Republic--these subjects before might have been taboo, but now they talk about it. They’ll talk about it openly. They’ll try to get those feelings out in the open, and I guess that kind of carries over into conversations with the English-speaking community, where we try to be open with each other.”

As a first-generation American, Fernandez said St. Patrick has had a central role in her life. She worked last summer as an administrator for the church-owned cemetery. On Sundays, she sometimes attended the general Mass at 10 a.m., then stuck around for the Mass in Spanish at noon. “Other kids had Brownies and sports,” she said. “I had the church.”

This reliance on her church--the assumption that it will be there to back her up--makes Fernandez typical of many new Americans, said David Pilgrim, a professor of sociology at Ferris State University in Michigan.

“The church has been, for good and bad, a tremendous agent for assimilation for immigrant groups--and the Catholic Church, more than any other church, was a major assimilationist tool,” said Pilgrim, who studies race relations and religion.

“More than a sanctuary, more than an anchor, the church is an answer-giver. And of course, if you are an immigrant, you want answers.”

Many parishioners at St. Patrick may be furious about the scandal, Pilgrim said, “but I think the people who are the most disillusioned are not the most recent immigrants. If you think about the role religion plays in peoples’ lives, when you have a tragedy or a travesty--when you have these soul-shaking events occurring--that’s going to drive these people closer to their faith. I don’t want to sound simplistic. But that’s what they have.”

Cloherty knows that in two years the archdiocese may reassign him. He would like to stay on at St. Patrick. But if he does move, his two requirements for a new parish are that it be urban and poor.

For now, he presides over a congregation that seems almost to have grown stronger in the face of crisis. Allard, an altar boy who thinks nothing of spending time alone with his priest, said the sense of solidarity at St. Patrick is hard to explain. But like faith, he said, it is there.

“I’m not sure where it came from,” he said. “Maybe God gave it to us.”